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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 28th, 2023

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  • Given that you are running pretty standard Apps, it’s fine to run without virtualization.

    • You don’t need a network share to access the files
    • TrueNAS wants access to the physical drives

    VMs add a useful abstraction layer between the hardware and the stuff you want to run. I tend to use VMs unless I have a reason not to.

    • Having many VMs limits the blast radius if you do something stupid. This was more relevant before Containers were widespread
    • If you do a major upgrade, you can snapshot the VM disk and roll back if it does not work
    • It’s easier to backup a single directory with all the VM disks than configuring X Backups on physical Hardware
    • If you want to replace a server, you can run a second VM and you don’t need additional Hardware

    Reasons to not use VMs are basically

    • access to physical hardware
    • being able to use a display/keyboard,
    • running on an embedded device


  • What OS are you running? If the main storage is on the network, chances are the OS can run from anywhere.

    • get a 100GB HDD from Craigslist for free or a few bucks
    • any old crappy USB stick.

    If you still want to go for PXE, you don’t need any fancy networking. All you need is a DHCP-Server and a TFTP server with a Kernel and an initramfs. I think DNSmasq can handle everything with a bit of configuration. Or you go for a full server provisioning tool like Cobbler or theforeman

    You assign each server their own image by placing the file in the directory /var/lib/tftpboot//Kernel (something along those lines)